Inquisitor Weekly: Of Sorcs and Soft Caps

Sorcerer's, know thy caps

Greetings TORWarriors! Last Inquisitor Weekly, I talked about the Matrix Cube M7-R3. The week before that I talked about the philosophy behind Inquisitor stat prioritization. Continuing that trend, this article is also about end-game Inquisitors and diminishing returns formulas. We have some control over the stats in our gear because we can swap out mods from other sets. To best take advantage of this, we must understand the stats important to Inquisitors and their diminishing returns soft-caps.

Sorcs like this make EC look "EZ".

If that introduction didn’t scare you off then you may just be a theory-crafter after all! However, before I get into all the number-crunchy goodness, I want to take a moment to thank Empire guild for helping me get up to speed with advice on stats for 1.2. Empire guild is the top-op guild on my server (Shien). Their latest accolade is securing the world-first for the 8-man story-mode: Operation Explosive Conflict. I was invited to come help heal in their 16-man hard-mode attempt and was pleased to see Inquisitors in every role of the trinity. Each of the Inquisitors I witnessed had stat totals pushing multiple soft-caps.

The diminishing returns formula on stats will give you less benefit-per-point the more you stack a stat. When you are wearing high-level gear that has a lot of the same stats on it, you may reach a “soft cap”. This is a point where you get so little benefit for increasing a stat that it’s effectively wasted points.

Lets examine Surge as an example. Surge increases how much damage your critical hits do by increasing your crit-multiplier. At 200 Surge, you’ll have about 72% crit-multiplier. At 250 Surge, you’ll have just under 75% crit-multiplier. That’s a jump of 3% from 50 points of surge. Adding another piece of gear with Surge on it will take you to 300 Surge and give you 76% crit-multipler. That’s only one additional percent for the same amount of Surge. After 300 Surge, it barely moves your crit-multiplier at all.

Once you reach a soft-cap with a stat, you can keep your eye out for upgrades or enhancement mods that have other stats. If both your Surge and Crit are at 250, adding 50 Surge and 50 Crit will boost your damage per second more than adding 100 Surge. Stats like Crit and Alacrity have higher soft-caps so you don’t need to worry about over-stacking them until you have about 350.

Forget Khem Val, the Matrix cube is a Sorc's best companion.

Luckily Sorcerers need not worry about Power and Willpower reaching any cap. Both stats should be prioritized above all others.

You can adjust your gear’s stats in several ways. Firstly, you can choose individual mods you want from different Inquisitor sets. You are also able to find good Inquisitor enhancements on gear from other classes. Your choice of stimpack or adrenal is based upon the stats you want to prioritize. Additionally, you can get moddable belts and bracers so that you can customize the stats. Your choice of augment in augmented orange gear is an additional avenue in which you can exercise your stat prioritization.

For Sorcerers, Endurance is a stat that helps, but never as much as another stat would have. My best advice is to ignore Endurance as a Sorcerer. Endurance appears on our best augments, our best relics, and all of our armor. The extra endurance on the Force Master’s set takes away from the Willpower which would be far more valuable for the damage dealing role.

For all you Assassins, I must admit I have much less knowledge about your stats, but I can tell you that you will want to have significantly more endurance than willpower.

This assassin is more a tank than Stormcaller!

Tweaking your mods to make your character stronger is a form of end-game advancement. An Inquisitor seeking to upgrade their character may replace Rakata level mods with Columi level mods from another class. The next week the same Inquisitor might further upgrade their character by transferring all those mods again to an orange piece of gear with an augment slot in it. Studious practitioners of the dark art of mod tweaking will find a long and complicated path to power.

This post was syndicated from http://torwars.com on May 3, 2012 at 8:04 am, and is filed under Torwars.com. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.